Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (24 page)

Steve Berkowitz, who had worked narcotics with Thomas at the Wheat Ridge Police Department in 1988, knew that if anything were ever to happen to one of his children, he’d call Steve Thomas. “Find her” would be all he’d have to say.

By now, Thomas was totally consumed by the investigation. He’d seen death before, but he had never seen the senseless murder of a six-year-old. He spent weekends working at police headquarters. He tossed and turned at night, and when he couldn’t sleep, he turned on his computer and worked on the case. As the weeks passed with no answers to all the open questions about JonBenét’s murder, he became more and more tormented. Sometimes Steve Thomas felt completely alone in his hunt for her killer.

John Eller was now sixty-one. He was born in Vallejo, California, but grew up in Key West, Florida. In 1968, after attending college and spending three years in the air force, Eller joined the Coral Gables, Florida, police force as a patrol officer. Like all rookies, he sat in a patrol car learning radio procedures, watching what his partner did, and trying not to get hurt. Eller’s early progress reports rated him satisfactory in judgment and knowledge of procedures. In 1970, however, a police board reviewed two minor, preventable car accidents that Eller had been involved in while on duty in a seven-month period. The board recommended that Eller be terminated on August 3,1970. Five days before that date, Eller resigned, noting that he planned to continue his career as a police officer. Two years later, at the Metro Dade County Department of Public Safety, Eller became an investigator in vice and narcotics and a crisis-intervention specialist. Those who worked with him saw him as quiet and serious about his career.

Eller was soon promoted to sergeant and became a detective. He worked in Dade County’s safe streets program. John Stack, a colleague, said, “He was viewed as a guy climbing the ladder to the top. He wasn’t a ‘street cop’ learning from experience. Once he got it in his head that his way was right, that was it. He was never one to trust a DA.” After a decade of civil unrest in Florida, Eller decided he’d had enough, and in 1979 he was hired by Boulder police chief Jay Propst as an administrator to help
reshape the department. To Eller, Boulder’s law enforcement was more conservative than Dade County’s. In Florida, he’d chase a burglary suspect into a house and drag him out. In Boulder, he soon learned, officers set up a perimeter, made sure suspects stayed inside, and waited until they had a warrant to search and arrest. They followed the rules.

In 1991, twelve years after Eller arrived in Boulder, police chief Tom Koby, who had replaced Propst, assigned him to develop, implement, train, and manage a twenty-four-member SWAT team, even though Eller had never worked SWAT. When at first Eller failed to pass the physical fitness test, the other officers joked that he might not be able to make it around the block. One Boulder officer said that it was like putting someone in charge of homicide who’d never been a homicide detective. Nevertheless, Eller enjoyed the challenge.

During one drug arrest, Eller ignored the lead officer’s advice to go through surrounding cover while approaching a house and instead ordered his men to make a straightforward entry up a driveway, an order that put the team in harm’s way. Then, when the suspects scattered, the officers were not only in danger, they had no perimeter coverage. On another occasion, Eller put himself in the line of fire of one of his own officers. Soon after, Jim Kolar, the team sergeant, took his concerns to Koby. He told the chief that Eller’s deficiencies in tactical training and judgment were endangering the lives of SWAT personnel. When Koby did nothing about it, six of the team members, with seventy years of experience among them, quit.

During his SWAT team tenure, Eller supervised the conversion of a former phone company property into the police department’s new $7 million facility, which also housed the fire department. When that project was completed in 1991, Eller was promoted to commander under Koby.

Many of Boulder’s hard-line police officers were loyal to Eller, whom they saw as a dedicated cop. He stood up for them, and he always insisted that integrity came first. But, Eller also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. His detractors found him inflexible and vindictive when his decisions were questioned. Diplomacy and tact were not his strong suits. People either loved or hated John Eller.

“We want to do it differently from the way we’ve done it before,” Tom Koby told Alex Hunter politely but firmly as they sat together in Hunter’s office at the Justice Center. Koby wanted his friend to know that he agreed with Eller: the Ramsey investigation should be run in a more traditional way, without the DA’s office. It was
their
job to find the killer, Koby said, not the DA’s. He didn’t want second-guessing from the DA’s office about the police investigation.

Hunter protested that Eller was not conducting interviews and developing evidence in an unbiased manner. He was possibly ignoring exculpatory evidence.
*
Hunter knew that a defense attorney would eventually challenge and probably destroy the case Eller was making. Furthermore, in Hunter’s view, Eller didn’t seem to care about protecting the case from a prosecutor’s perspective.

Hunter decided this was a good time to tell Koby that he had asked Dr. Henry Lee and Barry Scheck to join the DA’s investigation. Koby immediately complained that Eller and the detectives might see it as a lack of confidence in their ability—exactly the kind of backseat driving he’d been referring to, Koby said. When Hunter explained to him that Lee and Scheck’s expertise would be fully available to Koby’s people and that their solid reputations would help turn around the public’s negative perception of the police, however, Koby didn’t disagree. A few days later, he sent Detec
tive Trujillo to Connecticut to meet Dr. Lee and give him the case report, videotapes, and photographic slides.

Koby knew that someday the case would belong to the DA’s office and that they should reach a compromise now, not later, on how to cooperate. In the end they agreed to set up a “war room” at the Justice Center. There the police and the DA’s staff would meet on equal ground, but information would be stored in computers protected by passwords known only to the police. No information they shared or discussed would leave the war room. At Koby’s request, Hunter agreed to stay out of the day-to-day investigation; otherwise, the chief said, there could be no cooperation. Hunter was optimistic that Eller and Hofstrom would eventually work things out as they always had.

Though there was little forensic evidence so far, Hunter privately thought the Ramseys were probably guilty—because he saw no other explanation for what had happened. In the early stages he had expected something conclusive to come through eventually, that there was a realistic hope of some resolution.

Meanwhile the battle over the public’s right to know the contents of the coroner’s report was about to begin. At the Justice Center on Wednesday, February 12, First Amendment attorneys Tom Kelley and Bruce Jones, who were representing several media clients, argued before Judge Carol Glowinsky that the motion by Madeline Mason on behalf of coroner Meyer to withhold the documents from the public should be denied. Two Boulder PD detectives had also filed sealed affidavits, Judge Glowinsky informed Kelley and Jones. They opposed the release of the autopsy report and detailed the probable harm to the case from a premature disclosure.

The judge told Kelley and Jones that they could review the affidavits and the report in her chambers as long as they didn’t reveal the contents to their clients.

“To explain how I lost a case when everything happens in open court is hard enough,” Kelley told Judge Glowinsky. “To explain how this case was lost without disclosing what I know isn’t fair to my clients.” Kelley declined to view the contents. Instead he proceeded with his argument against the secrecy confronting the media.

Two days later, Judge Glowinsky agreed with the county’s assertion that the case was still in the “early” stages of investigation. She ruled that the release of the entire autopsy report would hurt the case and said that there was significant forensic evidence that should remain confidential. However, she ordered an edited version of the coroner’s report released to the public.

Many of the coroner’s findings concerning JonBenét’s genitals were excised from the document, but the phrase “abrasion and vascular congestion of vaginal mucosa” was made public. The complete report, the judge said, would be released in ninety days or when an arrest was made, whichever came first.

Meanwhile, the CBI reported to the police that a pubic hair had been discovered on the white blanket found around JonBenét’s body. When the hair was evaluated under a compound microscope, it showed a high degree of “buckling,” or twisting, and a greater degree of curl than chest or scalp hairs.
*

The hair might have gotten there in several ways: A member of the Ramsey family or a guest could have used the blanket previously, the hair could have come from inside the clothes dryer when the blanket was laundered—or it could have been left on the blanket during the commission of the crime. All the Ramseys were asked to provide
pubic hair samples. On February 13, as reporters were preparing to cover a press conference given by Alex Hunter, Patsy slipped into Boulder Community Hospital to give Detectives Arndt and Harmer her pubic hair sample. A week later, John went to the same hospital and gave his sample. By the end of the month, the police had obtained samples from Melinda and John Andrew and from John Andrew’s friend Brad Millard.

Alex Hunter had never held a press conference like the one that was scheduled for the morning of February 13. Just before he left the Justice Center for the city council chambers, where the press was waiting, he joked with a deputy DA that he would be doing battle with Goliath.

On a windy, partly cloudy day, Hunter, who was as yet unknown to most national media representatives, stood on a stage before a hundred reporters and photographers. The podium in front of him was adorned with the city’s seal, a jagged outline of the Flatirons. Seated next to him was Tom Koby, in uniform, looking at his notes and ready to make his first public statement on the case since his January 9 invitation-only press conference.

“As I watched the dawn arrive this morning, I was doing my workout—which you don’t allow me to do anymore midday,” Hunter began, not fully realizing that his words were reaching millions of viewers across the country.

Hunter spoke of the pressure that everyone, including members of the press, was experiencing and noted that the police and the DA’s office were all on the same team. While Koby, at his January 9 press briefing, had called public interest in the case “sick,” Hunter went out of his way to say that he wasn’t about to quarrel with the press. He called JonBenét’s murder “a case like we have never seen before, a case like I don’t think any of you have ever seen before. I know enough of you to know that we are all zeroing in on
the same thing, that we are looking for the truth, and we are looking to do justice in this case.”

His mission, Hunter said, was “to seek out the best of the best to work on this case. Because this is not Tom Koby and Alex Hunter’s case. No, this is a case of the people of Boulder, the people of Colorado, and certainly, without exaggeration, the people across this country whom this case has touched.”

Hunter’s tone became more deliberate and emphatic. “We know where we’re headed. We’re going to solve this case, but we’re going to do it
our
way…. I’m not going to file[charges] until I feel I
have it
.”

Hunter stressed that the press “shared responsibility.” The media could—and should—help the American public understand that a resolution of the case would involve exhaustive investigation, a double-dotting of
i
’s and double-crossing of
t
’s. The road to justice, he said, would not be paved in shortcuts.

Then Hunter announced that he’d enlisted the help of Dr. Henry Lee and attorney Barry Scheck. At that moment, many reporters felt Hunter moved the case definitively into the national consciousness. With Lee and Scheck—household names from the Simpson case—the investigation of JonBenét’s murder acquired star power.

Referring to the media criticism of his office, Hunter said, “We know there’s sort of a sense of a David and Goliath thing…. Let me tell you what we have put together. We’re calling it an expert prosecution task force.” In addition to Lee and Scheck, Hunter said, his four Denver-metro-area peers would be on the task force—DAs Bill Ritter, Dave Thomas, Jim Peters, and Bob Grant. Local reporters knew that Peters and Grant had personally handled the prosecutions of three out of the five men then on Colorado’s death row.

“We feel that we can match the resources of
anyone
, in bringing to bear on this case, in our search for the truth, to do justice, the very best that is available.”

Hunter then looked squarely into the TV cameras.

“Finally, I want to say to you,
through
you, I want to say something to the person or persons who committed this crime, the person or persons who took this baby from us.”

He paused a moment before continuing: “The list of suspects narrows. Soon there will be no one on the list but you. When that time comes—and as I have said to you, that time will come—Chief Koby and I and our people of the expert prosecution task force and the other resources that we bring together are going to bear down on you. You have stripped us of any mercy that we might have had in the beginning of this investigation. We will see that justice is served in this case. And that you
pay
for what you did. And we have
no doubt
that
that
will
happen
.

“And I say to you that there will not be any failure in that regard. We will ensure that justice is served for this community, for this nation, and, most important, for JonBenét. Thank you.”

This was a surprisingly fierce Alex Hunter, whom the press had not seen before. Then Tom Koby took his turn.

The chief began by discussing the evidence in general terms. Some DNA testing had already been completed by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, he said.
*
But some
of the evidence would soon be transferred for further examination to Cellmark, a well-respected private lab in Maryland. It would all take time—“several months,” Koby said.
**

He ended by saying, “This is not going to be quick, in the face of this most difficult situation, as Alex pointed out—there are none bigger than this, that have gotten this kind of scrutiny. But you [police officers] have stood the tests, and you have responded professionally. You are true professionals, in the genuine sense of that word.